Backlinks are crucial for building authority, gaining a presence on authoritative websites to reach your target customer and to build a valuable backlink profile of high quality websites linking back to your webpages.
An important part of SEO which many webmasters fail to monitor is identifying which websites are linking to your website. You could be gaining many valuable links through your outreach efforts but any link juice you hope to get from these links will be diminished if the rest of your backlink profile is full of spammy links.
Keep reading to find out why you should audit your backlinks…
Identify Malicious Links
Without analysing your backlink profile you could be allowing spammy sites linking to your website which will be damaging your sites authority. Competitors can also use black hat techniques and add your site to malicious tools that submit your website to thousands of low quality directories which will cause significant damage.
Identify New Link Building Opportunities
By analysing who is linking to you and from where, this will help you identify new natural link opportunities to engage with a new relevant audience. After a while, link building can be a strain and feel like you have explored every relevant angle so by seeing what types of sites find your website relevant enough to link to can give you a whole new avenue to explore.
Improve Anchor Text
It is best practice that links to your website do so via branded anchor text so by performing a link audit you can identify how users are linking to your site and then contact them to kindly change the anchor text to your brand name. During your link audit identify links that link to your website via keyword anchor texts or variations of ‘click here’, ‘read more’, ‘website’ etc.
Penalty Recovery
Google are constantly updating their algorithms which determine where your site is ranked so it is important to monitor your backlink profile to ensure that it meets Google’s guidelines, if it doesn’t then you can end up with a penalty that will remove you from the search results!